Latest Buy - Dominion Energy (D) Again.

Like i mentioned in this post when i initiated a position in Dominion Energy recently, i was hoping for D to fall to the mid to upper 70's, so that i could buy some more in order to decrease my cost basis.

Guess what - within a few days, dominion announced that they were planning to buy out the south Carolina based utility SCANA (SCG). Scana has been struggling a bit lately because of their failed nuclear plant, their stock has been lagging the overall market and has been down while the rest of the market is red hot.

The powers that be did not like this piece of news and punished Dominion's stock. Yes, this will put some pressure on dominion's cash flow for dividends, but they have put out statements confirming their commitment toward maintaining and increasing their dividends. 

The fundamentals haven't changed, moreover if they execute this correctly - this might be a good thing for the company in the long run.

With these things in mind, i doubled my initial small position in Dominion Energy at $76.7 a share. At the current dividend payout, the yield on cost is 4.01%, but since they have already established a 2018 dividend of $3.34/share - the forward yield on cost on this purchase is 4.35%.

Brings my overall cost basis down and the overall yield on cost to 4.18%. I will take that from a well run stable utility.

I will keep an eye out for D, and am open to making another small purchase if the stock falls another 5% from here.

Have you been buying anything in the relatively soft utility and REIT sector lately ?

Commission free trades for over 10 years? Sign me up please...

I have been investing in individual stocks on and off for over a decade now, and my primary and only taxable investing account has been at Scottrade all along.

I really had no complaints with scottrade, they have a very basic platform with good research tools. Also a $7 commission worked for me because i usually invested in multiples of $700 (usually $1400) to keep the trade to commission ratio down to about 0.5%-1.0%.

Every now and then, sending them a message about how other trading platforms were either providing cheaper commissions on trades , or giving out x number of free trades for new customers would also get me a few free trades. The only issue being that these free trades would expire in a month or so.

Latest Buy - Dominion Energy Inc (D)

The utility sector has been lagging the overall market lately. One of the reasons might be the assumption that the recently passed tax reform will not help the utility sector as much as they would the other sectors.

While that might or might not be true, some of the utilities have given up some gains and as a result are off their recent lofty highs.

Supplementing Passive Income - Cashback Portals (Ebates)

I mentioned before when i spoke about the money saved/earned by leveraging credit card rewards, i like to supplement passive income received by buying high quality dividend paying stocks by looking for other avenues as well.

The one i will talk about today is using my favorite shopping portal - Ebates.

Latest Buy - Microsoft (MSFT)

Just recently, i wrote about how i have missed out by not investing in Microsoft.

Even though i have exposure to the stock via index funds that i hold in non-taxable accounts, i always missed out on purchasing MSFT as an individual stock.

Till now.

The one that got away - Microsoft.

I have been investing in individual stocks on and off since 2004. I still remember back then when i first transferred money from the bank account to the brokerage account, i contemplated hard between Yahoo, Microsoft, Apple and Google. I was fairly confident that investing in any of those 4 will result in capital appreciation over a few years.

I was looking to hold long term but did not necessarily look at dividends and the whole dividend growth investing style back then. I obviously ended up picking the worst of the 4 and purchased Yahoo. I mean, make no mistake i sold those shares back after over a year and still made over 20% - so don't get me wrong - it wasn't a bad choice, it just wasn't the best one, or the second best or the third :)

Dividend Increase - AT&T (T)

AT&T (T) declared a $0.50/share quarterly dividend. It is a 2% increase from the prior dividend of $0.49.

This is payable Feb 1 for shareholders on record Jan 10 (ex-dividend date Jan 9)

AT&T keeps its tradition of increasing the annual dividend by 4 cents a share (1 cent a quarter) every December. Even though the increase is small in terms of percentage, the good part is that the base this is being increased upon is well above a 5% yield.

The market meanwhile continues to go up everyday in anticipation of the tax deal. Value investors like me are both happy because existing positions are doing well, but not so happy because fair value is harder to find with every passing day in this red hot market.